“What?” Zio asked in a quiet voice.

“The picture of Ciana and me,” I muttered, dropping my hand and clenching my fingers into a fist. “It was missing. I didn’t realize it at first, but now that I’ve had time to absorb it all, I remembered that I hadn’t seen it. Not even the frame.”

My uncle’s entire body seemed to turn to steel, his blue eyes so like four of his five children looking cold as ice. “The one of you and her at her nursing school graduation?”

I nodded, thrusting my hands into my pockets. “Tighten her security even more.”

“I’m already on it,” he growled, stomping out of the conference room.

I watched him go before turning my gaze back to Pop. He lifted his brow, but I shook my head, letting him know I’d tell him when we were done here.

If someone were going to try to hurt me, though, why they would take the picture of me with Ciana and not the one of me with Nova was beyond me. Everyone who even presumed to know me knew Nova was my weakness. Yes, I was closer to Ciana than any of my other cousins, and making me her honorary twin when we were little kids had ensured a tight bond between us.

But Nova was my heart.

She could bring me to my knees with nothing more than a single tear.

Leaving her was always hard, but driving away from her the previous evening had been equivalent to torture. Nothing had been resolved between us. She was still angry with me, still hurting. But there was no time to explain, to tell her everything she needed me to say.

When I’d texted her once the jet had touched down at the airport, she hadn’t responded. Nor had she picked up when I’d called her that morning before she was to leave for school. Not getting to hear her voice or see her words on my phone was causing a tornado effect inside my head. Swirling everything around until nothing was where it should be, tearing my brain apart until I went mad from it.

And it hadn’t even been twenty-four hours since I’d seen her, damn it.

The meeting with the security guards lasted another hour, but no one cracked under the pressure of Pop’s vicious questioning. Frustrated, I returned to my office, where CeCe was still working on cleaning up the mess with three of our custodians. “Out,” I barked to the cleaning crew. “Return in two hours.”

As the last of the men exited the room, CeCe straightened and smoothed her hands over her black pencil skirt. The white blouse she wore was cut lower than she typically wore, her hair pulled into her typical knot at the back of her head that I was accustomed to seeing it in.

Human resources had promoted her to my personal assistant when my old one had retired. I’d inherited the woman from Pop and she’d been ancient, but she’d run my business schedule with an iron fist, and I’d appreciated her dedication. CeCe might have proven herself in her previous position within the company, but she’d done nothing but fuck up left and right since becoming my assistant.